Malcolm Moore is the Telegraph's Shanghai Correspondent. He arrived in China in July 2008 after three years in Italy as the Telegraph's Rome Correspondent. Before that, he was the paper's Economics Correspondent.

Yangtze River Delta road trip – Day One – Themes

I'm blogging this week from Zhejiang and Jiangsu, the two provinces next to Shanghai which have become China's factory-land.

The point of the trip is to try and get a view from the ground about how China's economic miracle is unravelling, if indeed it is.

This week is critical. After the Spring Lantern Festival today, millions of migrants will officially be expected back at their factories as production lines get back to normal. Will they come back and will there be jobs for them?

Underneath are some of the themes I'm going to be exploring this week, but I would love to hear from you what you are curious to find out.

- China has announced large discounts on a wide range of household goods, from washing machines and fridges to computers and motorbikes. According to the stats, 80 per cent of all white goods sold in December were subsidised. But is this enough to help manufacturers who are still reeling from seeing their American and European orders cancelled?

- An estimated 26 million migrant workers have now retreated from the coast to their home provinces. The ones who remain at work have seen their pay slashed. But rural families depend on the money that their relatives send back from the factories. Without this income, how will they manage?

- China's success at making products cheaper than anywhere else in the world created hundreds of "one-product cities", places which only made shoes, or toy guns, or cigarette lighters, and prospered through economies of scale. But when the demand for their product disappears, where does that leave the city?

- China's banks handed out £160 million of new loans in January. Where did that money go? Did any of it go to exporters? And is it helping? Are the tax rebates helping? Can the factories turn things around this year?